Valve's Steam License Causes Linux Packaging Concerns

With catering to Ubuntu Linux users as their first priority, Valve released the Linux beta as just a Debian package. Other Linux distribution packagers meanwhile want Steam on their own Linux distribution and to make it easy for their Linux gamers, so some have begun creating their own Steam binary packages. One of the first Linux distributions doing this was Arch Linux where they re-packaged Steam for Linux for their system. However, concerns have arose whether this is permitted or not.

There's a new Arch Linux mailing list thread about Steam in their repository. An Arch Linux developer is concerned about the re-packaged Steam Linux binary being there without the explicit consent of Valve. "I just noticed that steam was put into the multilib repo. It's unfortunate that such questionable packages are brought into our repos without any discussion (similar case are the catalyst drivers). My concern is it's license here. We modify and redistribute steam here which is probably not allowed according to 1.B of steam's license. So unless I am wrong here or there is a written permission from Valve please remove this package asap."